Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now
- PART ONE THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EXTENSIONS
- 1 Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning
- 2 Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment
- 3 How Alike Is It? versus How Likely Is It?: A Disjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgments
- 4 Imagining Can Heighten or Lower the Perceived Likelihood of Contracting a Disease: The Mediating Effect of Ease of Imagery
- 5 The Availability Heuristic Revisited: Ease of Recall and Content of Recall as Distinct Sources of Information
- 6 Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value
- 7 Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
- 8 Self-Anchoring in Conversation: Why Language Users Do Not Do What They “Should”
- 9 Inferential Correction
- 10 Mental Contamination and the Debiasing Problem
- 11 Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and Similarity “Heuristics”
- 12 Compatibility Effects in Judgment and Choice
- 13 The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence
- 14 Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions
- 15 Probability Judgment across Cultures
- 16 Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting
- 17 Resistance of Personal Risk Perceptions to Debiasing Interventions
- 18 Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Idiosyncratic Trait Definitions in Self-Serving Assessments of Ability
- 19 When Predictions Fail: The Dilemma of Unrealistic Optimism
- 20 Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives
- 21 Counterfactual Thought, Regret, and Superstition: How to Avoid Kicking Yourself
- PART TWO NEW THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS
- PART THREE REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
- References
- Index
6 - Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value
from PART ONE - THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EXTENSIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction – Heuristics and Biases: Then and Now
- PART ONE THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL EXTENSIONS
- 1 Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning
- 2 Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment
- 3 How Alike Is It? versus How Likely Is It?: A Disjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgments
- 4 Imagining Can Heighten or Lower the Perceived Likelihood of Contracting a Disease: The Mediating Effect of Ease of Imagery
- 5 The Availability Heuristic Revisited: Ease of Recall and Content of Recall as Distinct Sources of Information
- 6 Incorporating the Irrelevant: Anchors in Judgments of Belief and Value
- 7 Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
- 8 Self-Anchoring in Conversation: Why Language Users Do Not Do What They “Should”
- 9 Inferential Correction
- 10 Mental Contamination and the Debiasing Problem
- 11 Sympathetic Magical Thinking: The Contagion and Similarity “Heuristics”
- 12 Compatibility Effects in Judgment and Choice
- 13 The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence
- 14 Inside the Planning Fallacy: The Causes and Consequences of Optimistic Time Predictions
- 15 Probability Judgment across Cultures
- 16 Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting
- 17 Resistance of Personal Risk Perceptions to Debiasing Interventions
- 18 Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Idiosyncratic Trait Definitions in Self-Serving Assessments of Ability
- 19 When Predictions Fail: The Dilemma of Unrealistic Optimism
- 20 Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives
- 21 Counterfactual Thought, Regret, and Superstition: How to Avoid Kicking Yourself
- PART TWO NEW THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS
- PART THREE REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
- References
- Index
Summary
Imagine walking down a supermarket aisle and passing an end-of-aisle display of canned tomato soup. A sign on the display says, “Limit 12 per customer.” Would such a sign influence the number of cans you would buy? Would you buy more cans than if the sign said “No limit per customer”? Our intuitions say no, but empirical evidence indicates that purchase behaviors are influenced by such a sign (Wansink, Kent, & Hoch, 1998). Consider another example: A wheel of fortune is spun and stops at the number 65. You are then asked if the percentage of African countries in the United Nations is above or below that number. Could this exercise influence your estimate of the relevant percentage? Although it may seem unlikely, the evidence is that such anchors have an effect: Groups who received larger numbers determined by a wheel of fortune gave higher estimates than groups who received lower numbers, demonstrating that irrelevant anchors influenced these estimates (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
“Anchoring and adjustment” is one of three well-known heuristics described by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) in a classic paper that also describes the representativeness and availability heuristics. Like the other heuristics, anchoring and adjustment can be a useful way of making judgments. Imagine that you are trying to set a value on an antique chair that you have inherited from a distant aunt. You might recall seeing a very similar chair in slightly better condition at a local antique dealer.
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- Heuristics and BiasesThe Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, pp. 120 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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